100/100

[originally written on my blog]

I don't understand how you make a film that looks like this and then go on to make 32 subsequent films (and counting) that look nothing like this. But then, neither do I understand how you achieve the perfect synthesis of your many gifts and somehow conclude that you totally whiffed, to the point where you beg the studio to destroy the negative. Each of the film's tricky balancing acts—between visual beauty and verbal dexterity, between wit and pathos, between the specific and the universal—couldn't be more sublimely realized; like most every masterpiece, it's a tiny, insular story that nonetheless embodies human folly at its most ubiquitous and grandiose. That Woody chooses to make…

“Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat—oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be.”

Is life fundamentally sweet or sour? Depends on your point of view, I suppose. You get a new job, make a new friend, fall in love—life is honeyed and worth living. You lose that job, have a falling out with that friend, fall out of love—life is curdled and should be thrown out. The funny thing is, those circumstances don’t parcel themselves out discretely. They tend to coexist. You get a promotion but have a fight with your spouse about the…

Film #3 of Florin's Recommendations

“I feel like we're in a Noel Coward play. Someone should be making martinis.”

Isaac Davies is the typical Woody Allen character, an underachieving intellectual who is not confident enough to do what he wants to do in life, someone who is living a romantically –and of course sexually- problematic life and seems to struggle with the endless complexities of human relationships, someone who has always been one step away from achieving success but the fear of rejection and the lack of confidence have kept him from reaching greatness and happiness, an individual who is desperately searching for the meaning of life in a time and place where things- thanks to modernization- are changing so…

What it lacks in the universal relatability department in which Annie Hall succeeded in, it makes up for with stellar craftsmanship that manages to turn one of Allen’s more cynical, dry scripts into delightful movie magic. I can see why he hated this film, it doesn’t work on paper, it doesn’t quite go anywhere. and in his eyes it still didn’t work post-editing. However his constant wit combined with Gordon Willis and George Gershwin’s peak work is impossible to resist. Diane Keaton adds light to the picture in a way that only she can, as does Mariel Hemingway, who in many ways makes this film work as it easily could’ve been an annoying character. For a movie about a pretentious, male television…

Woody Allen’s Manhattan is a fascinating study of the pretentious-self Woody Allen, an unintended bio-pic about himself, which make his comments about how Manhattan being his least favorite film of his filmography perfect sense. How some say, don’t trust the comments of the artist about his own work. It’s the case mostly in the music industry, but this is a fascinating example in the film-world. In fact, Woody Allen even asked United Artists not to release his film after he finished it. Woody Allen’s Manhattan might be one of the greatest films about New York ever made, while being the perfect depiction of Woody Allen’s self and his own comments won’t change that.

Whether it’s his nervous realization that the…